I went to Shenzhen, China! It was clean and very urbanized and modern. I never want to go back there again ☺️ Immigration was a nightmare, and the people are vapid, inconsiderate, and high-maintenance. The prices are not cheap by Chinese standards. Despite the gross weather, the buildings lack A/C. The great firewall makes it difficult to look up things in common apps and search engines, and you need to use Alipay and Didi to get around (although that's all parts of China, but egregiously so in this city).
If you have a visa (and you should get one because they're cheap in the U.S. right now!), I'd save your time and money and go somewhere nicer like Yunan Province, now that was a blast. I might make a post about that place.
Anyway, I took some pictures! I also cuss and rage at great length, so you may not want to read further, but I feel like the world needs to know about this place. You have been warned (about Shenzhen).
We were only here for two halves of separate days and one full day. I was beat and tired. This was our last stop after Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau, and a lot of it was spent getting dragged around by my dad and his non-ending quest for Michelin star eateries. I'm sorry, that's not what you came to this post to read about, but you have to understand where my mental space was when arriving.
We arrived here to Shenzhen by High Speed Rail coming from the Hong Kong side, and had to pass through immigration before hopping on the train. (This is important because you could potentially miss your train if you're caught up in immigration!) The process is slow and long, and requires several checks. The officers don't speak any other language besides Chinese, and treat you like cattle. Fuck them. Also, maybe it has to do this this being the Guangdong Province, where the folks are snooty and arrogant anyway? Fuck these guys. I honestly can't say I encountered anyone sincere here except for the taxi drivers; they were cool.
We arrived in Futian station, which only took 15 minutes once the train actually got moving. The train is NOT air-conditioned! You know how prisons are super cold because there are studies that if temperatures are too hot, aggression levels increase? It was like that but the opposite. I swear, China deliberately doesn't air-condition their train stations and airports to make people angry. Shanghai was like this. Wuhan was like this. Harbin, Kunming, Beijing...What is wrong with these guys??? And it's not like they don't have the electricity to turn on the A/C, either. Yes, it's silly for me to harp over this, but it makes things so gross and sticky and stinky! And might I add they're the worst at using restrooms if only for the justification of employing unfortunate human beings to stand outside your stall and clean up after you when you're done, and that's only in wealthy places like this ill-forsaken shit-city fuck!
We stayed at the Investment Building Hotel, which was literally right outside one of the HSR exits, thank goodness. I took pictures of my room because this building is set to be completely renovated by the end of 2026. It's a prime location for tourists, as it's close to the station and within driving and walking distance of shopping centers, so they're going to make it fancy and modern to entice more guests. There are only two floors dedicated to hotel rooms. One floor is a restaurant floor, which hosts some decent breakfast.
Oh yeah, when we were in the elevator, there was this old man leering at my family because we were dressed in t-shirts and shorts, like fuck you, we were literally going through immigration to get here, why would we wear long clothes? Pretty sure he thought we were hillbillies, the uncultured fuck. Only Chinese people would wear suits to go to somewhere like Arizona or Yosemite. I'm not even kidding. I've seen it.
My friend didn't have her tourist visa, so she stayed behind and had a grand time in Hong Kong. I wanted to say that it was nice having an entire room all to myself and free from my parents, but the A/C was broken in my room!!! It was always 26 C! The one saving grace was that everything else about it was nice. Free water, free slippers and other toiletries, a huge separate shower stall (lots of places in Asia tend to have the shower floor and toilet floor be a shared space, gross), and a nice toilet and plenty of sink space. There were even koel birds oo-ooing outside my window.
So the whole purpose of us coming here was to go to Costco. We needed to take a taxi, and it wasn't close. It took about 40 minutes to get there, and as an engineer, I noticed how badly the roads were designed: merges for no reason, arbitrary speed limits, on-ramps with no rhyme or reason and not enough decision distance for auxiliary lanes yikes!
The funniest thing is guys will swerve in and out of lanes and still end up behind the same cars they were trying to pass. You do realize switching lanes creates more work for your car, don't you? You're gonna wear your tires and brakes out faster, dudes.
In any case, somehow we survived the ride and made it. You might notice the dedicated space for scooter parking. Fuck these scooters. Since China is a heavily electrified county, these are all electrical, and you'd think that'd be a good thing, but these fuckers are so quiet that you can't hear them approaching BECAUSE these awful things are ALLOWED ON SIDEWALKS! Yes, the mopeds, too! The scooter and e-bike riders will casually run at you at 50 kmph and be like, "Can you get out of MY way?" Oh! I wonder what that bicycle symbol on the road pavement is for??? I absolutely hated the scooters and bicycles here. I hated them. I hate them so much. Fuck.
This Costco is novel in that there aren't too many in China. This one has a mailing service that lets you pay a fee to have your Costco goods shipped anywhere in China. Pretty neat, and it makes sense since, again, there aren't too many Costcos in China, period. My mom ended up buying a bunch of dried shrimp and mushrooms and sent them to relatives all the way in Harbin, from Shenzhen for about ¥210 CNY. Not bad! It only took a few days to get delivered, too.
Oh god, so the biggest thing I noticed when coming here and walking around was that this city has so so so many kids. And they're all terrible and awful and spoiled shittards. I hate them all. Where tf are the parents? There were kids racing down the Costco conveyor escalators for shopping carts in scooters, and the store attendants were shouting at them to stop. I didn't want to stop and see if they did, and I doubt they wanted to. Someone needed to clothesline those snappable necks I swear to the gods they don't believe in--
So like with Taiwan, there are employees who will cook some of the meats for you as samples. There were many queues, and I wish I had the patience to stay in line. Something kind of cool is that the Costcos here open and close late. I believe this Costco doesn't close until something like 9:30pm.
There is a much larger variety of seafood, produce, and take-home kits, and I wish we had such things in the U.S. There was a corn gift kit! China sure loves its corn. They also had the smallest limes I've ever seen. My fat finger for scale. (I was fat by the end of the trip, okay? I literally gained 12 pounds...)
I'm going to be honest, this food court had the worst Costco food I've had the displeasure of being served. The okonomiyaki pizza was actually standard affair if you know what the usual cabbage-based kind tastes like in advance. The pork strips were tasty with ma flavor that hit right, but the accompanying mochi strips tasted fake and heavy. The boba was the nastiest I've ever had. I can't believe how badly it tasted, something like fake Ito-en milk tea with oil preservatives and a melted mass of boba that clogs your straw when you try to slurp it.
The pecan ice cream was actually ok.
Uhhh...so when we were waiting for our taxi to take us back to the hotel, some psycho girl hopped into the taxi when we went around back to put our Costco goods in the trunk. When we saw this stranger, we were like, "Who's this?" and the taxi driver responded, "I thought she was with you?" to which we said no.
This girl's phone was dead, so even if she wanted to, there wasn't a way for her to pay for a ride, but we had already paid in advance for this taxi to pick us up, so we needed to take this taxi. This girl refused to move, and my bleeding heart of a mom suggested we just pay to let her get to where she needs to go, and I had to firmly tell my mom "NO. This bitch is literally insane. Even if she got to her destination, who's to say she'll even leave the taxi? We don't even know if the taxi driver will be safe with her in the car."
Also, this lady wanted to go to Shenzhen(???) to which the taxi driver said "You're in Shenzhen! All of this is Shenzhen! Get out of my car or I'll call the police!" and the lady said to go ahead and call. The taxi driver did, and when he got connected and was explaining the situation, only then did the lady open the taxi and leave. Okay...????
Anyway, I ate some lychee and chugged a whole bottle of black currant juice for dessert in my hotel when we got back.
The next day, I walked to CocoPark, a large shopping mall. Everything was expensive even by American inflation standards, and because of the Chinese holiday, it was very crowded with so so so many shit-kids. There was a brat shouting and playing some phone game and yelling in his phone in a shaved ice place. The shaved ice wasn't cheap nor delicious enough to justify NOT kicking the kid out. I wanted to kill him. His parents weren't anywhere to be seen.
Hilariously, there was a table of young adults next to him who seemed wholly unbothered by his shouting. It wasn't until a little while later, that I noticed they were signing. They were deaf! It doesn't get any funnier than that oh god.
The basement has a bunch of restaurants. We ate a light lunch at a Japanese establishment with dry-prepared ramen (except the menu said soba???). They even had grilled eel which was not bad, honestly.
I am surprised they allowed Winnie the Pooh to be winnable, considering the whole thing about him a few years ago.
The last thing we ate was an ice cream shaped like bok-choy. There was even a radish one. It was okay. Another thing that fueled my rage was that there are absolutely no Mixue's in Shenzhen. It must be too affordable for a sterile fake-rich place like this city.
And that was a thing, too. One of our taxi drivers was explaining that a bunch of people got rich by buying up cheap land and driving up demand and prices for real estate. Those who couldn't afford land were forced to move out to the rural areas, and the rich kept on getting richer and richer. Such is capitalism.
What also bothered me is that these people are so homogenous that they have no branching interests outside of keeping up with the latest release from a famous brand or making boring videos for their social media. It's worse than the trends in America because they have no interests outside of this--no preference for traveling, no curiosity about art or nature, no hobbies, no individual sense of fashion, just shells of people. And since there is a standardized ideal of beauty, everyone starts to look the same and dress the same. It seems to be a bigger issue in the tech cities, and Shenzhen is the financial hub of China, so it's almost to be expected, I guess.
Okay, last thing. I had an awful time in CocoPark not just because of the prices, lack of things to do, and people, but the mall, itself, is very inaccessible and unsafe. I walked outside and immediately ate shit because there was a step right outside of the glass door with no yellow warning striping--just a little gray plaque that blended into the gray stone that said "Watch your step." No shit???? I was so mad I kicked the step when I got up.
Fuck this shitty city. Fuck these people. Fuck the e-bikes and e-scooters. I'm never coming back here. I was so glad to get back to Hong Kong, even if only passing through the train station and airport. The immigration process leaving was a little easier, I'll say that. Ugh.
